The 12 days of GCHQ quizmas: test your brain power with these daily puzzles

This article was taken from the December 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

Scratch the surface of social media and it will reveal a mine of information. This visualisation shows migration patterns between countries, based on Facebook profiles. A team at Wolfram Research in Massachusetts analysed data from Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook, a free service evaluating users' presence on the social network. The group, led by programmer Taliesin Beynon, looked at 1.26 million people's home towns and current locations. Everyone in the graph agreed to be "data donors" (only those who have moved country are shown).

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The arrows are sized proportionally to the population they represent. Those moving from India to the US form the largest group, at 4,100 people. (There's no data about migration to China -- because Facebook is banned there.)

Beynon says further analysis could reveal more links. "Is there a Commonwealth effect?" he asks. "Strong ties between countries that have been in a colonial relationship?" It shows how rich your Facebook data can be: "More can be done with it than you might assume."